Ramzan Kadyrov betrokken bij moord volgens Oostenrijkse authoriteit (en)
Austrian investigators have said that Russian regional chief Ramzan Kadyrov in 2009 ordered a political murder in Vienna, in the heart of the EU i and the seat of international institutions such as the UN i and the OSCE i.
The Vienna Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism has said that "Kadyrov, Ramzan" was one of the "instigators" of the shooting of Chechen asylum seeker Umar Israilov, according to documents seen by German news magazine Der Spiegel.
The Office alleges that Mr Israilov was pistol-whipped and shot dead by two men outside a supermarket shortly after noon local time on 13 January 2009 in Leopoldauerstrasse, less than two kilometres from the city centre.
Mr Israilov, a former officer in Mr Kadyrov's security services, had previously testified in Vienna and in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg that Mr Kadyrov practiced torture. Mr israilov's testimony thus made him a "risk factor for Kadyrov," according to the documents obtained by Der Spiegel.
Mr Kadyrov is suspected of responding by creating a network of agents in Austria amounting to a "military intelligence service" and then said to have set up the killing via a Chechen man living in Vienna under the name Otto Kaltenbrunner.
The assassination allegedly ordered by a president of Chechnya and ally of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recalls the murder in London in 2006 of Russian dissident Aleksandr Litvinenko by a hit squad suspected of links with Russian secret services in an event which strained UK-Russia and EU-Russia relations.
"The EU needs to be calling on Kadyrov to be investigated, first and foremost by the Russian authorities," Human Rights Watch's Moscow-based activist Allison Gill told EUobserver. "It's important the needs of justice are not balanced out with the needs of policy."
"[It is] time to issue an international arrest warrant [for Mr Kadyrov]," the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights' Vienna-based legal expert Manfred Nowak said to Der Spiegel.
The Vienna Office's findings come amid signs that Moscow is itself keen to curb the atmosphere of impunity for killers of human rights defenders and opposition activists in North Caucasus, said by the EU to be a major factor in growing instability in the region.
Russian delegates to the Council of Europe i in Strasbourg on Wednesday (23 June) voted in favour of a report that denounced the "climate of pervading fear" created by Mr Kadyrov and called his level of personal power "disgraceful in a democracy." It added that Russia should enforce the 160-or-so outstanding ECHR judgments against it and that Europe should do more to protect refugees abroad.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has in recent months noted that unemployment and social problems contribute to violence in North Caucasus, in a change from previous rhetoric which spoke of "wiping out" terrorists. He devoted in May a session of his human rights council to the North Caucasus problem, while Mr Putin in January told a meeting attended by Mr Kadyrov that human rights defenders should have better working conditions.
"It's time for Russia to move from the new rhetoric to action," Human Rights Watch's Ms Gill said.